Disclaimer: I am not posting in an official capacity, nor as part of any of my work-related duties. The content on School of Good Trouble is my own opinion, and it is created outside of my job time and responsibilities.
School of Good Trouble is written without any use of LLMs or other generative AI. All text and images are original images created by me or sourced from non-AI creators.
About School of Good Trouble
School of Good Trouble is a collective effort for/with you. Words make the world. Words shape reality. We build relationships through vocab and conversation, snark and dreams. We understand what is true, just, and possible through the bounds of the language we possess.
But, too often, our words don't register with supervisors, administrators, and the other gatekeepers who say no to our ideas for how to make the world a better place. In the School of Good Trouble, we're using communications research and practice to get better at making a point, making an ask, making change. We address topics like:
Why relationships matter more (and accomplish more) than awards
Dealing with being addicted to trying to make things better
Finding meaning in life beyond our jobs
The urgency of figuring out something to love about writing
Voicing the frustrating parts of systems change
Actionable tools for change, like; a department-level climate survey template, three things to tell someone to help their writing, reverse-engineering your teaching evals (or any assessment), and making a to-don’t list
You can check out these posts and more in the archive.
Throwbacks vs. the here-and-now: All posts from August 2024 onward emphasize an actionable angle on topics like these and more. Before August 2024, SGT existed in iterations including ZEST: Makin’ Academic Lemonade (now a major category of SGT), the commnatural blog (all sorts of topics), the commnatural newsletter (mostly art-science), and in some cases, posts date as far back as fruit.root.leaf (an expat food/science/lifestyle blog I wrote while living and working in Quebec, Canada). The origins of SGT date back to 2010, making this one of the longest-running projects I’ve ever worked on (a big deal for someone diagnosed with ADHD in my late 30s!). The common thread through all these is that change for the better is possible, when we work together and leverage all the tools at our disposal.
Learning toward action: Because I am (currently) an academic, and because my work sits at the intersections of communications research and practice, art-science integration, science writing, and organizational change/administration, School of Good Trouble does have an educational foundation with a communications bent. But, that doesn’t mean we’re just here to swap neat ideas (though that’s a valuable part of SGT!) The ultimate goal for SGT is to learn toward action — to find ways to build from the ideas shared here into concrete things we can each do that move us toward our goals of making the world better.
But, I’m not a scientist/academic/communicator [insert your noun here]
There is a lot of valuable information locked up in academic corners of the internet and physical world. Most research sits behind paywalls, for a lot of reasons that are hard to change and mostly not within the control of individual researchers. This information isn’t just stats or fancy graphs. It includes theoretical framings, major ideas, and results of studies that all have the potential to be incredibly useful tools for all of us working to enhance how our relationships, organizations, and communities operate.
School of Good Trouble builds on a foundation of:
science (primarily ecology/conservation/natural history)
art (including illustration, watercolor, and pottery)
writing (especially creative writing and Writing Studies/Rhetoric and Composition — fields of research about how to teach people to write better), and
communications research (especially a corner of this research focused on science communication, or sharing science beyond academia).
A lot of the insights from these fields are really helpful for building/maintaining relationships, taking collective action, and facilitating change, regardless of what kind of work you are trying to do. That’s why School of Good Trouble focuses on how to leverage these insights in your work.
About BGM
I grew up in a special sliver of Montana called the Rocky Mountain Front — the only place in the lower 48 where grizzly bears still regularly roam the prairies where they originally evolved. I had a wide-ranging career in gardening/local food, outdoor/sustainability education, community development, science journalism, and art/photography before somewhat accidentally moving into academia. I did most of this work as a freelancer, solopreneur, and/or professional volunteer. This means my take on what’s useful and what’s problematic about higher education is informed by not having spent most of my life and career becoming “used to” how these systems work. I’m also adamant that we have more resources in academia than I’ve ever had access to in the nonprofit/community sector, and we should be using them for good, not hoarding and pretending we don’t have enough money to make a difference!
I’m an inveterate fixer, group activity leader, and love nothing more than identifying a programmatic issue that can be solved with a planning process (defining values and goals, identifying policies and procedures to shift toward those Vs & Gs, and articulating a work plan to get it done together). What I know about myself is that I finish projects I work on with other people (sorry, languishing solo projects!).
These days, my research, teaching, and facilitation/training emphasize transdisciplinary approaches to ethical science communication (scicomm) and institutional change. I lead programs on scientific writing, graduate student success, and strategic planning across North America and I co-founded/led a major scientific society’s Communication & Engagement Section for nearly a decade. My day job is as a Professor of Practice in a science department at a rural, public, state university. There, I am the founding director of a campus scicomm initiative. On the side, I am also co-founder/co-host of Meteor: The Honest Podcast about Scicomm with Impact and a scicomm career coaching program called SciComm STEP: Sparking Transitions for Experienced Professionals. I’m available for public speaking, trainings, collaborations, and coaching. Contact me directly to discuss logistics, fees, and scheduling.
A big part of my motivation for all this work is that I was a first-generation college student, a nontraditional and first-gen graduate student, one of the only people in my family with any degrees at all, and I was a cultural/linguistic minority immigrant in French Canada. I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck, I’ve made beds and waited tables, and I’ve weeded gardens and wiped noses. I come from a rural, smalltown childhood, do not have a PhD, my job is not on the tenure track, and almost all my work has been in science though little of my formal training was. So, I understand what it’s like to be the odd one out in a room, to recognize systems that aren’t built or run with me in mind, and want. to. change. them. to make space for more, different, other! School of Good Trouble is my way of thinking aloud what I’ve learned about doing that change-making successfully and sustainably.
I live in rural Wyoming, where I’m learning again (for the umpteenth time in a lifetime of gardening) that there is no autopilot. This summer, I’ve given up and let the ground squirrels have the garden — I quit when they started climbing the fences, having realized the futility in tunneling into the well-protected boundary. My first-and-best dog isn’t allowed to chase wildlife, so he’s no help. My husband and I are busy working on other projects, so the garden has become my daily reminder that non-attachment is a vital emotional practice. You can connect with me on several platforms where I say what I think: BlueSky, LinkedIn, and the Meteor podcast. I also run a weekly newsletter during the academic year that curates scicomm training, jobs, and funding opportunities.
Why pay for a subscription when most of this is free?
Let’s be clear: School of Good Trouble is a labor of love. It’s a deadly serious hobby, if you will. I’ll still get a paycheck if you don’t pay for a subscription. And, anyone who cannot afford an additional monthly payment can email me and I’ll provide a gift subscription, no questions asked. (These get processed monthly, so it might take a bit to get your access.)
But, if you’re able to contribute $5/month (less than one lunch and actually less than most cocktails or fancy coffees!), or $50/year, you’ll help me do important things to support the School of Good Trouble community. These include: give away gift subscriptions, develop resource guides, purchase books/magazines/subscriptions that help me pull together the ideas that boost you here at SGT, donate to mutual aid funds that are near and dear to the work we’re doing in the SGT community, and compensate the hours I spend online and elsewhere researching and writing the content shared here. Your paid subscription also helps cover internet and other utilities bills and other overhead expenses related to SGT.
Bottom line: Your subscription helps make it possible for the SGT community to mutually support each other as we all use words to make the world a better place.
If you have the capacity, you can donate here to bolster the gift subscription fund or give someone you know a gift subscription here. There is also a discounted group subscription rate.
What’s in a paid subscription to School of Good Trouble?
Weekly posts are for everyone, as are resource guides. Weekly posts are freely available for four weeks. Paid subscribers get full-time access to all posts/post archive, plus: the ability to join the SGT community by commenting, sharing resources, participating in Q&As, suggesting topics and content to be covered, and whatever other perks we come up with in the future.
Thank you so much for your support and for being a part of the School of Good Trouble community!
Your engagement and contributions make this possible.
